Unity Stats Show Linux Gamers Are Well Below 1% Of Their Customer Base

[Tuxee]

WinXP 17.3%, Win10 8%... Sounds legit. With these figures I wouldn't care to much about these "statistics".

[ruthan]

"Windows 8 at 0.7%, Windows 7 at 65.9%, Windows XP at 17.3%, Windows 10 "

Poor windows religious users, they do not know that there is something better. I will give a Debian Xfce live dvd to my aunt, she is suffering from slow boot and shutdown and win10 upgrade ads in her win7 laptop.

Empty argument, if you need gaming, Linux is still disaster, Mac OS is a bit better, but only real choice are Windows or Console, or maybe SteamOS if you dont care that in your collection is only 1/4 of Windows games.
I working with MacOS, Mate, Xfce, Gnome, KDE and if you are heavy GUI user as im there inst nothing better than customized Windows with Total Commander, Display Fusion, Filemenu Tools, Filebox extender atd other utils, Visual Studio is still best IDE for advanced coder and with cygwin and putty is still best experience.

I gave my mother Ubuntu too, because she just need to boot into Firefox it was good enough for most of time, but:
- something she was stuck with some tutorial for average users, only described only for Windows
- because of Linux EXT4 bug, she was 2 weeks offline, because booted into busy box.. and i cant fix it remotely
- she just needed to upload pictures from camera and phone - and windows just not open after device was connected => dead end
- flash upgrade issue, i age of flash only youtube

Those problems werent worthy of save 100 bucks, even without visits - my 5 years old nephew also want to play Rayman and Cars..
I wasnt even 100 bought old XP copy for just $50.

[schmidtbag]

Empty argument, if you need gaming, Linux is still disaster, Mac OS is a bit better, but only real choice are Windows or Console, or maybe SteamOS if you dont care that in your collection is only 1/4 of Windows games.

Mac definitely is not better for gaming. Mac has less hardware support, worse overall performance, and as of lately, there are less games release for Mac.

there inst nothing better than customized Windows with Total Commander, Display Fusion, Filemenu Tools, Filebox extender atd other utils, Visual Studio is still best IDE for advanced coder and with cygwin and putty is still best experience.

Yeah... and not everybody has a 6-core Xeon with hyper-threading and 32GB+ of RAM.... It takes way too much junk to make Windows the "best" experience. Visual Studio is good if you code in C or anything C-like. Otherwise, it is seriously overkill for anything else.

I gave my mother Ubuntu too, because she just need to boot into Firefox it was good enough for most of time, but:
...

Funny - whenever I install Linux for the computer illiterate, they don't bother me for years. Meanwhile, I constantly find myself helping people who use Windows. If you just install default Ubuntu, then yeah, your mother is going to have a hard time adjusting. But the nice thing about Linux is tweaking it to your needs. If all your mother needs is firefox and camera imports, it is very easy to simplify the computer to do just those and nothing else.

If you knew remotely accessing was going to be a problem, you should've had the foresight to port forward ssh.

[theriddick]

I have quite a few U3D games in my Steam library. I know some of them won't work for me under Linux with Open driver because of the issues I have mentioned around 500x throughout this site. I will give them another go once my videocard comes back to me, Wasteland2 for example is U3D, I also have some Shadow Land of some sort but that crashes on startup. (most games will start with FGLRX driver when I use to have that, but performance was very poor).

[duby229]

If you knew remotely accessing was going to be a problem, you should've had the foresight to port forward ssh.

I'll be willing to bet that most of these so called windows "experts" don't even know what NAT is.... Port forwarding, what?

[kpedersen]

Unity Linux support is extremely poor and pretty much an afterthought. The only "Linux" they support is Ubuntu and the support is almost unofficial. *

Perhaps this could be the main contributing factor as to why Unity is failing in the Linux market?

*The Linux editor support is almost non-existent.

I am hoping Unity will be gone in a couple of years. I really do dislike it and find it a big waste of time for developers. The only thing it has going for it is a very large marketing budget towards the "prosumers".

[Dukenukemx]

Really not a surprise. Fallout 4 for Linux? How about GTA V? I could list a number of games, but you need new titles like these ported ASAP for Linux. I still have a Windows 10 machine for this reason.

[torsionbar28]

That may be so, but I will tell you this, without manually setting the power states of my 390x under Linux with the standard package driver results in freezes and system restart problems. NOW that I understand the problem better I can easily resolve it, but it required a fair bit of tom foolery under terminal before X start to resolve that issue.

How is that a Linux issue? Does your Linux distro explicitly state support for this hardware? If not, then it's on you for experimenting.

For example, I buy only SuperMicro brand motherboards, because they explicitly state Red Hat Enterprise Linux support for their hardware. That's the distro I use, so I know it will work 100% straight out of the box, with no tinkering and no issues.

Example #2, I use only NVidia graphics cards (even though I dislike using a closed binary blob) because my hardware and OS are explicitly supported - I know it's going to work 100% right out of the box, no surprises, no tinkering.

There are a number of vendors that sell laptops and workstations with Linux pre-installed and fully supported. Buying from one of them is a sure bet for a fully supported and working no-tinkering-required system. Just as buying a Windows peecee from Dell you know the hardware will be 100% compatible with Windows, or buying a computer from Apple, you know it'll run OSX 100% with no issues.

[ssokolow]

UPDATE: Yeah, according to GamingOnLinux.com's article, they're not making any attempt to control for the large number of Unity games that are limited to one platform.

...which means these stats are worthless at determining Linux market share because:

1. The data they released is too processed for us to filter it to only the games that are available on multiple platforms.

2. It says nothing about all the people playing non-Unity games (eg. MonoGame, Unreal 4, etc.) ...which also could introduce an unknown amount of skew, depending on how much of that "I'll play something else. These Unity developers never tested their push-button Linux build before releasing it" is just bluster.

3. As mentioned, the Unity browser plugin was never available for Linux (and I know a lot of people, myself included, who either never knew about pipelight or considered it too much bother when other games exist)

(Plus, of course, the dubious utility of the more detailed information, given that over 80% of Linux users are on "unknown" rather than Ubuntu/Mint/etc. and the suspiciously distributed percentages for the various Windows versions.)

Heck, I'm not sure what they would be useful for. Developers would want to know how much effort to put into various platforms, but this survey can't be used for that. Similar problem for users. This survey is like those old GeoCities-era vanity visitor counters.

[Zoll]

Unless you go into your local store and buy a PC/Laptop/Console preloaded with Linux, these number will hardly change. Most people do NOT care about the OS, they just want to play games.